Sixteen Years

I ended up taking Monday off from work this week and Melissa and I celebrated our 16th wedding anniversary by catching a matinee of The Dark Knight and then eating out. She gave me a card with the final scene from the movie Sixteen Candles on its front that plays Spandau Ballet's 1983 one-time hit True when opened. True to form, I forgot to buy a card for Melissa and was naturally scolded for my thoughtlessness.

Banged out a review of AMD's latest, greatest video card, the Radeon HD 4870 X2, last weekend. It's crazy the amount of time these articles can take. Writing for a small site I generally have little time before the NDA lift, and with this X2 I got it on my front porch Wednesday and had until late Sunday to finish. Makes for very long work days when I spend 5-6 hours after a normal 8-hour day at my regular job.

Finished the 5th Malazan Book of the Fallen novel by Steven Erikson this last weekend, Midnight Tides. I read the first four years ago, imported copies from Canada's Amazon.com, but somewhat lost interest until a few weeks ago. I'm now plowing into the 6th book, The Bonehunters, a smallish 1,200-page beast of a book.

I forgot to mention in my last update that Melissa and I moved some of the rooms around in May and June. Basically we wanted the kids to each have their own bedroom upstairs, which meant moving our bedroom into the master downstairs. Which meant I had to lose that room as my study of over eight years and move it upstairs into the loft, where I now sit as I type this. We ended up enlisting the help of my nephew, Chris, and my cousins, Josh and Jake, all three very large guys who were needed for some of the heavy lifting (our bed's headboard is 7' of almost solid wood and took four delivery guys to get it upstairs years ago). I'm not particularly fond of my new study, it's hotter upstairs and this isn't ideal for hardware testing, and whatever is on the TV floats right up at me. Plus I had to semi-retire my 400-watt Klipsch speaker set that I've enjoyed since late 2000. But Megan now has her own bedroom, repainted to colors her mommy let her choose.